The present invention relates to a television conference system including many television monitors.
In the television conference system, a TV camera and a TV monitor are provided in each of two conference rooms, and an output from the TV camera in one of the conference rooms is transmitted to and displayed on the TV monitor in the other conference room as if a conference is being held in a single conference room.
Examples of the conventional television conference system of this type are a split screen system and a frame-multiplexing system. In a transmitting side of the split screen system, moving pictures output from, e.g., two cameras are encoded by an encoder and transmitted to a receiving side. In the receiving side, the moving pictures are separated and reproduced, and the reproduced pictures are displayed on two TV monitors.
In the above conventional systems, as described in "TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION OF NETEC-Z TV CODEC" of NEC ENGINEERING REVIEW (Sept., 1986), since a large number of participants are imaged by two TV cameras, a size of a picture of each participant is reduced. As a result, it is difficult to give the participants ambience so that they feel they are united together. However, if three or more cameras are used, each reproduced picture is displayed on an area of 1/3 or less of the entire screen in the split screen system. Therefore, only a portion above the neck of each participant can be reproduced. In the frame multiplexing system, each picture can be transmitted at a rate of only 10 frames/sec or less. As a result, time resolution is degraded, and reproducibility of the picture becomes poor.